


What Comes

by CopperCaravan



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Blood Magic, Fenera Mahariel, Gen, Other, Post-Awakening, Varel is alive and I don't care what canon says, way pre- mahariel/nate but the hints are there and you don't have to squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-27 19:33:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10042745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: In the month following the defeat of the Mother and the disappearance of the Architect, Mahariel and Vigil's Keep must recover from the war, welcome a number of Orlesians, and stand up to the scrutiny of Stroud and the Order.or: What came directly before Anders and Justice fled to Kirkwall.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note descriptions of blood magic, the events of Soldier's Peak, violence, darkspawn, the Deep Roads, and decaying bodies that vary from not-very-graphic to unfortunately-very-graphic. All that great stuff that comes with fighting icky monsters and having a spirit living in a very, very, very dead body.

The Vigil is remarkably silent today. Mahariel suspects it will remain so for some time.

Perhaps they could spend the days following their victory in celebration—drinks and shouting and contests and dancing, even. Anything to throw off the weight of these last several months, anything to make her Wardens _happy,_ to give them a taste of the lives they should have had were the world not beset by talking darkspawn and laughing broodmothers and burning cities full of screaming and smoke. _We won,_ they might be chanting, in tune with some Ferelden bar song. _We won and the battle is over._

Perhaps they could spend the days following their losses in mourning—remembrance and could-have-been’s and shots of ale poured out to spread in the dirt for every person they failed. Not half the punishment she deserves for everything she let happen, everything she did or didn’t do or wouldn’t change even if she could go back and do it all again.

The question was answered without their input, however. The silence is simply the product of absence. Anders and Sigrun, with the Mistress of the Treasury and the Captain of the Guard and half their remaining forces, have made the short journey to Amaranthine—or rather, to the crumbling, burnt out ruins of Amaranthine. Hopefully, there is something to salvage—lives and their livelihoods, a building or two, bricks. Certainly not goodwill, not understanding or acceptance or fealty; she doesn’t expect as much and she doesn’t fucking want it.

The others, save Justice, who still makes the citizenry uneasy, have trotted off to the farms with news of an imposed levy of coin and crops to feed all the refugees Mahariel herself has created.

She’ll be lucky not to have another coup on her hands, not to press more poisoned drink to her lips or barely dodge another arrow shot from a dark corner. She’d deserve it too, running the arling into the blighted dirt as she has—not that she’d ever _wanted_ to run an arling to begin with.

She had expected Nathaniel to go as well—these were his people, after all, long before they were hers, if they ever really were hers at all—but he opted to stay behind at the Vigil. With Varel still on the mend, it’s a great help to have him here, buried neck-deep in shem-tongued legal writs as she is.

It’d be almost nice—the silence—if it weren’t for the heavy weight of it pressing into her on all sides.

And then it’s interrupted.

She doesn’t know who he is or why he came or what he wants, but there’s another Warden in her doorway and she wearily reminds herself that things would have fallen apart sooner or later regardless.

~

“Did the months and _months_ of letters not answer all these questions already?”

It’s difficult not to pace back and forth from one end of the hall to the other but she won’t give the man the pleasure (or the advantage) of seeing her come undone with anxiety while he sits prim and proper at her table.

“Apparently not,” he says, accent as thick as the hair lining his lips. There’s the barest hint of coming grey, just at the edges. She thinks of Alistair, shaving a bit of scruff from his face early in the mornings on the road. She thinks of Nathaniel doing the same at the mirror in the washrooms.

_Stroud_ , he calls himself. And he claims not to be an Orlesian Warden though he brought a whole troop of them and clearly originated there himself. _Simply a matter of timing,_ he’d said. There is no such thing as coincidental convenience; anybody who can survive in the world of the shems or the Wardens learns that quickly enough.

“I’ve been over your correspondence with the First Warden and—”

“Then you already know Alistair and I have no idea how I survived. We’ve nothing to tell you.” She can hear her voice rising, both in pitch and volume, and she sends an empty prayer to her silent gods that Stroud will think it annoyance rather than worry.

“Either that is an unfortunate falsehood or a more unfortunate truth.”

“Then take your pick and be done with this!”

At that, her shouting loud enough to have echoed down the hallways, Stroud sighs and presses his thumb and forefinger into the wrinkled skin between his brows, creased sheathes of paper dropped to the table in front of him.

“How long until the Calling takes you?” he asks. “How long until it takes your Wardens? We’ve precious few hopes and you are one of them.”

“Everyone said as much about the archdemon too,” she mutters, but Stroud ignores that.

He lets out another weary sigh, as though she is a troublesome child and not the person who lost her life time and time again for the sake of people who hate her, who ignore her, who ask more and more of her, who look at her like he does now.

She and Alistair, they were the world’s “precious few hopes” and it doesn’t matter that they won; her continued existence is a sin and they want her to repent.

It’s only a matter now of which will win out in the end: her exhaustion or her spite.

~

Mahariel catches one of her remaining guards by the sleeve and tips her head toward the east. “Assign the new recruits to bunks in the barracks,” she says. Even with thirty-eight new bodies to accommodate, she knows they have the room. _All those beds, empty now..._ “I’ll have Stroud in the Keep and you can tell those pr—you can tell them they’ll have rooms in the next few days.”

“Yes, Commander.” He moves to do his duty but she holds him back a second longer.

“And find Nathaniel for me, please.”

She’d sent Nathaniel away for the duration of Stroud’s interrogation. Hopefully he’d done something productive, like warn Justice of their new arrivals, rather than sit outside the door trying to listen.

He doesn’t know about the end of the Blight. None of them do, save Oghren, and not even Oghren realizes she should be dead. And this isn’t how she wants them to find out if they really have to know.

_Of course they have to know._ She can’t leave them in the dark, fumbling around for answers like she and Alistair did. They deserve to know—what may await them and how she’s betrayed them. But not today, not yet.

The guard a few paces off now, she turns and makes her way down the hall to Varel’s room.

~

Elric is a blood mage.

The elf-blooded bastard of some Marcher noble, he’d made his way to Ferelden in the hopes that he could get lost among a crew of servants and he had. He’d been working with the gardeners for several months before Mahariel even came to the Vigil and, like most of the Vigil’s pre-existing workers, she hadn’t cared to send him off and replace him.

Damn good thing she hadn’t too, because his magic was the only thing that kept Varel alive after that ogre blew through their gates.

He’s leaning over Varel’s bed when she comes in, his fingers pressed into the weak pulse at her seneschal’s wrists.

“How is he?”

The bandages around Varel’s waist have been soaked through with blood, again, and he’s as pale and clammy as one would expect. The sight makes her sick with worry, sicker with guilt.

“He needs another transfusion, I’m afraid,” Elric says, wiping away his own sweat with the back of his hand. “I’ve been trying to clot the blood, but the wound is so wide...”

He drops into the chair by the bed and Mahariel feels so... old. He can’t be more than a year her junior, maybe two, but her youth—walking beside the aravels, tracking deer with Fenarel and Tamlen, just being happy—it feels so far off, so far gone, so long ago.

Elric’s chin and nose are just _barely_ longer than she’s come to expect from shemlen, his ears just _barely_ carrying a tip. He’d stand out for sure in a clan, but she wonders if the shemlen can tell. She wonders if he’d be stuffed into an alienage like his mother was, or if he’d pass as human among the commoners in the city. Perhaps she can only see his mother in him because she knows it’s there. It’s still so hard for her to understand the elves in the cities, even having spent the last two years among the shemlen herself.

“How old are you, Elric?”

The question catches him off guard and he stammers a bit. “S—seventeen. I think. Ma’am.”

When she was seventeen, she was stealing blueberries from Master Ilen’s pockets, swimming in the river under the pretence of fishing. The life of the Dalish isn’t easy, no, and sometimes _those_ are the only memories that come to her at night, but she was never a terrified half-blood performing forbidden magic for a Warden, praying to the Maker in the back of her mind that she wouldn’t be used for her talent then executed or handed over to the Chantry.

She’ll protect him. Just like she’ll protect Anders and Justice. Just like she’ll protect them all because damn her if she’s going to lose anyone else.

She wants to tell him so, needs to tell him and she’s sure he needs to hear it but she doesn’t know how to make such a promise when they’ve just lost so many, when one of her failures is lying in bed, slowly bleeding to death in front of them.

“There you are.” Nathaniel ducks his head into the room before entering, a strange mannerism he claims is leftover from years of etiquette training. It still makes no sense to her. “They said you needed me?”

Well, that isn’t exactly what she’d told that guard but it is, admittedly, the truth.

She points her thumb toward Varel and Elric. “Need another transfusion first, if you’re feeling up to it?”

The corner of his mouth twists down before he can stop himself. He’ll do it, but she knows he’s not overly keen on the blood magic. Keeper Marethari was never too fond of the idea either, though those under the influence of the Chantry seem far more fearful than any Dalish mage she’s ever met.

She wonders what Nathaniel would think of her if she told him about Avernus, or about...

_Not today, not now, not today, not now..._

Nathaniel steels himself and rolls up his sleeve. She tries not to laugh at the tense lines forming along his forehead as Elric, at least a head and a half shorter than Nathaniel, closes in on him.

~

For the third day in a row, Mahariel leaves Varel’s room with Nathaniel propped against her and a quiet plea for Elric to fetch her if Varel wakes up.

Nathaniel really shouldn’t be losing so much blood so quickly either, but Elric says he’s the only one here with the proper sort of blood—whatever the hell that means. He’s a blood mage for a reason, however, so she supposes that if anyone knows, it’s him.

Yesterday, Nathaniel had more or less been able to walk on his own after a bit of rest but today he’s especially pale and unsteady. Weighty too, not that she’d say that to him, but he does have at least 80 pounds on her and he’s awkwardly tall.

Still, they make it to her quarters, which she’s recently learned was previously his mother’s “study” (though she can’t imagine what sorts of things the woman “studied”) and she tries to ease him gently into a chair, but mostly just ends up dropping him there.

He _laughs._ “If Varel wakes up a Grey Warden, I will absolutely not be held accountable.”

His words are a bit slurred and she can feel the blood drain from her face so she turns away from him, toward her desk, and rustles around in a drawer for some stashed away food.

“Elric says he won’t, something about the transfusion.” Ah, jerky, good. She actually doesn’t remember hiding this here, but it’ll do. She passes it to Nathaniel, careful not to let him drop it. “He tried to explain it to me but honestly...” She shakes her head; everything Elric’s tried to explain to her about healing has gone right past her. _Clearly_ , she wasn’t meant to be a mage.

“Well then why doesn’t he just fix us?”

_Avernus. All those Wardens, corpses in cages, bodies burnt from the electricity, from the magic, blood boiling from the inside, all those Wardens, his Wardens, the sounds they must have made, their voices twisted in pain and outrage, betrayal, Avernus, Avernus, Avernus._

If she’d stopped to think, if she’d calmed herself down... If she’d let Avernus live, maybe he could fix them, but she’d been so angry and, as ever, so damned impulsive, so unforgiving. Has she truly damned them all? And cheated her own death too.

“Doesn’t work that way,” she says, all her focus on the dried meat in Nathaniel’s hand, the contours of his wrist, the fine lines criss-crossing over his knuckles. Anything but the image of Elric holding a pint of blood to the light, anything but the bright crackle wisping across his fingers, anything else, anything. “Elric does something to the blood when it’s outside the body. Can’t just bleed you dry and then pump it back in.”

“Hm.” It’s more of a grunt, really, what with his mouth full of food. Truth be told, he seems a little drunk; she’d be fooled if she didn’t know better. “What’d you need? What’s he want, that... that man, that Warden. With the...” He presses the length of his forefinger against his lip in imitation of Stroud’s whiskers and when she can’t stop herself from laughing, Nathaniel cracks a slim smile too.

“He’s brought some new recruits,” she says. Half-truths are not quite the same as lies. She tried that line on the Keeper once. Only once. “To replace those we lost when... when this all started. So for one, you’ll have to pick a roommate.”

She holds up her hand when he makes to argue.

“We don’t have the room anymore, Nathaniel. Some of them haven’t taken the Joining, so they’ll be in the barracks but if even half of them die—” When did she become so numb to that thought? When did that happen? “—we’ll still be doubled up.”

The pallor in his skin is undoubtedly due to more than just blood loss now. “Anders or Oghren? What a choice.”

“Or Justice.”

He squints, hesitates, starts to say what they’ve all been avoiding. “He’s not—”

“I know. But it’s another day’s worry. Just consider yourself lucky you’ll not be bunking with Woolsey.”

He grunts again, this time on purpose, and shifts forward to rest his elbows on his knees, only a bit unsteady. “And the other matter?”

Everything. _Everything._ “The others should be back tomorrow and I...” She pauses, takes a breath. Turns coward once again, stumbles over half-truths. “I know Anders and Justice are still... upset with me. I’d hoped you could talk to them before we have the Orlesians brought in.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Since when has Anders ever listened to me?”

A breath of nervous laughter escapes her, but she knows that Nathaniel knows. Half-truths aren’t quite lies, but they are close enough. “I know, but we’d be better off pretending. For now, at least.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, eternally screaming  
> (also prepare yourself bc I cut the Hard Shit from the end of this chapter and decided to stick it in the next one so you can count on that coming real soon to ruin your day. hint: I did research on body farms)  
> also this is draft 1.5 because I only had the energy to beta half of it bc I am an old man so point out what you find if you please

Thirty-eight Orlesians stomping around her grounds and not quite half of them are even Wardens. As if she doesn’t have enough headaches.

“Why would you even bring me unjoined recruits?” It’s impossible to keep the accusation out of her voice, Stroud’s seniority be damned.

Stroud shrugs and folds back the tips of the letters in his hand. Her letters. “I assume Warden Commander Fontaine felt that if they were to be your Wardens, they should live or die by the Joining in your outpost.”

After yet another hour of interrogations (resulting in exactly the same stoic impasse as before), she’s too exhausted, too frustrated, to bother hiding her disdain. “So it’s just about me dealing with the bodies, then.”

Once the words have left her, she deflates. She can feel his silent disapproval pressing against her and she knows she deserves it.

“I... Let’s just move on,” she says. “Why so many? As I’m sure you could see when you passed by the city, I can’t spare all the resources needed to house and feed these people.”

Finally, _finally,_ he drags his eyes away from her letters and to her face. “There was no way for any of us to know the state of things before we arrived. And, as I’ve said already, I was not travelling with your new recruits. Our simultaneous arrival to Amaranthine was coincidental.”

“How could any of you expect me to be a Warden and an arl?” It comes out much louder, much angrier than she’d meant for it to, but then again, maybe not. She _is_ angry. And she _did_ mean it. She drags her hands down her face, inhales. “I’ll need your help to prepare for—”

“C-Commander?” A small voice, smaller than usual even, from the doorway, and Elric’s face peeking around the door. “Terribly sorry for interrupting, but I’m afraid there’s a... well, there’s been a complication. With Var—with Seneschal Varel, I mean. With, ah...”

Luckily for everyone, her concern wins out over her impatience.

~

Elric’s trembling as he talks, his words as unsteady as his hands. If Mahariel wasn’t so confused, so angry with herself and with everything else, if she wasn’t so damn preoccupied with everything that’s going wrong, wrong, _wrong_ , it’d occur to her that he’s afraid.

“Commander, I swear I did everything you said; I re-checked the notes you gave me. I—I did, I did every single time I treated him—”

“Elric.” She doesn’t say anything else, just presses the heels of her hands into her temples and takes a deep breath. She just needs him to stop for a moment—to stop fumbling for words and to stop his frantic thoughts skittering around in a panic. It makes her as anxious as he is and she doesn’t have _time_ to come apart over just one more thing gone wrong.

Varel’s breath comes evenly, his fever gone and his chills calmed. He looks almost peaceful now, after these days of rest and blood magic and people leaning over his bed every half hour.

She takes another deep breath. Perhaps there’s a way to fix this?

“The last transfusion was yesterday?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“What’ve you done since then?”

Elric picks up a small pad off the table by the bed and drags his finger along the page as he reads aloud. “I monitored his condition for half an hour before testing the blood to be sure it took properly, then I managed to get him to take some water. After that it was just waiting; I did my best to heal him a bit more but without Anders here, I... I can’t...”

“It’s alright, Elric. Just tell me what happened after that.”

“Nothing. He was fine—well he wasn’t _fine,_ but he was...” Elric moves his free hand back and forth frantically, at a loss for the word he needs. “And this morning, when he seemed to have recovered so quickly, I—I just thought, I just had a feeling, and I decided to check his blood—just a pinprick, just to... and it’d _changed_.”

For a moment, the room is silent save for the sound of Varel’s breathing, and Mahariel only stares at him, trying to fit everything Elric’s said into a box in her head, into a space that makes sense.

“Commander, _please._ I swear I did everything right when I gave him the transfusion. I... I was _certain_ that the spell worked. Please, Commander, you have to believe me.”

Now his fear registers. She turns around to look at him, a scrawny elf-blooded boy, wiry muscles borne of youth and yard work, fear borne of his past and his oh so uncertain future. He’s afraid of _her._ Like so many others. She blinks, shakes her head to clear everything away, just for a moment.

He’s a warden now. Varel is a warden.

It didn’t work. And she can’t fix it. She can’t fix them. She...

She moves without realizing it, takes hold of Elric’s shoulders, her hands a bit too tight and far too heavy. “Elric, listen to me. Listen.” She speaks quietly, deliberately. He must hear her. “You saved him. Thank you. You _saved_ him. But you cannot tell anyone what we’ve done. Not the blood magic, not the transfusions, not the notes I gave you. Do you understand?”

His eyes have only widened, first with fear and now with confusion, and he’s silent, staring at her while he works out her words in his head. They don’t have time. She shakes him, just a little, and repeats herself louder, harsher. “Do you understand, Elric? You can’t tell anyone.”

“I...” He swallows, blinks those big brown eyes of his. An escape: that’s what he’d sought at the Vigil. Safety, at least a little. “Y—yes, Commander. I understand. Yes.”

She releases him, aware of the finger-shaped marks left against his skin. She has to get a hold of herself. She has to. She has to gain control of this before...

She turns back to Varel, still sleeping peacefully in bed. “Burn your notes,” she says. One hand rests on her hip, the other covers her mouth as though that will hide her words so quick they slur together. “All of them. Varel took the Joining before the assault. He was wounded. He survived. You assisted... herbs or something. Do you know anything about herbs? No, nevermind. You had nothing to do with it—monitored him. You just watched him for us, tried to make sure he ate and drank when he was awake. That’s all.”

Silence from behind her. She’s not in control—not of herself, not of this. Nothing. The boy’s panic leaves him three steps behind and hers thrusts her forward just like everything has since that godsdamned mirror. One fucking moment and there’s been no peace since.

“Elric!” Too loud, too loud. Quieter: “Do you hear me? Burn them now, right now, and say nothing. You know nothing.”

A shuffle—the sound of things clicking into place, of movement, of panic and uncertainty—and the smell of magic, of heat, of burning paper. “Y—yes, Commander.”

~

Nathaniel watches her pace, just back and forth in front of the desk in her bedroom. She knows she shouldn’t, can’t imagine what Duncan or Riordan or Stroud would think if they saw her here, panicking, accomplishing nothing. It’s weak. Worse, it’s _evidence_ of weakness. It’s one thing to keep the worry in her head, but to let it claw its way out into the room where anyone—even if anyone is only Nathaniel—can see? Pathetic. And not at all worth following.

Anders was right.

“It’s fine,” he’s saying. “It will all be fine.”

But it won’t. And he doesn’t know—of course he doesn’t! She’s been lying to them all. She _hated_ Duncan when Alistair told her about the Calling, when Riordan told her about the archdemon, when Morrigan told her about the baby. She hated him and she still does and now she _is_ him. Worse than him, even, because he only stole her, one useless, dying person, and she’s stolen so much more than that.

She turns away from him, stares at the stone of the wall beside her bed. Imagines digging a knife into the grout until she’s carved one out.

“I need to tell you something. I should’ve already but—” _I tried to warn you all away,_ she pleads. _In the cell, along the road, in the Keep._ She remembers every word she’d said to Oghren, every pitiful, half-hearted attempt to run him back home and how badly she hadn’t wanted him to go. She remembers clapping the dust off her hands and wondering why Anders was still around once Anora and her soldiers had disappeared from view. She remembers asking Sigrun if she wouldn’t just rather come back to life instead.

_Give him his family’s things and release him._

_It’s not that simple, Nathaniel Howe._

_You don’t have to do this, you know. There are other ways to redeem your family’s name._

Funny how Nathaniel—how all of them—only started listening to her after it was too late for them to extricate themselves from her and her black blood.

“You’re going to hate me,” she says, more to herself than him, but still he answers. Laughs a little, even.

“Never.”

But the words don’t come. Dirthamen doesn’t guide her tongue; seems he, like his brethren, aren’t good for much these days. Or maybe they’ve only turned their backs on her because she’s walked a path far too close to the Traitor’s for their liking. _Dread Wolf take her_ —but hasn’t he already?

They stand there, in silence, him sat at her desk and watching her stare at her wall. “Commander.” A pause. A breath. The creak of a chair as his weight rises from it. The sound of three steps taken, the distance closing between them. The silent presence of a hand, hesitant but wanting to comfort.“Mahariel.”

She shakes her head, rolling both her lips into her mouth, pressing down with her teeth.

The moment shatters with a heavy knock at her door. “Commander!” Garevel. “We’ve returned with news. Among other things...”

She nods, turns around slow enough for Nathaniel to lower his hand back to his side as though it was never raised to her in the first place. She cannot—will not—take comfort from him, not after all this.

“Wait for me in the main hall,” she calls toward the door, ignoring the look Nathaniel gives her. “I’ll send for some food for all of you.”

“Yes, Commander.” How Garevel can still call her that after everything, how any of them can... _Fuck_ but Anders was right. “Though, I’d advise against the food—for now, if you’ll allow me the suggestion.”

She only _hmms,_ though surely he can’t hear her from the hall. She hears his boots heading back toward the entrance soon, though, and makes to follow.

Nathaniel doesn’t actually put his hand on her arm, but he halts her all the same. “I assume we’ll finish this later?”

“Certainly sooner than I’d like,” she shoots back, all her effort shoved into being Commander, just one more time, just for the next hour, just until she can lock herself back in this room and deflate once again, alone.

~

Anders, to no one’s surprise, is not seated at the large table in the middle of the main hall. He’s nowhere to be seen in the room at all.

She feels a sinking in her chest and, just as quickly, steels her whole body, juts her chin just that much higher. Right now, how Anders feels—and how _she_ feels—doesn’t matter.

Sigrun sits still as stone in her usual seat, three down from both Woolsey and Garevel, who’ve both settled themselves near the head of the table. Woolsey is still jotting something down when Garevel’s looks up to see Mahariel coming through the door and marches straight toward her, a quick salute tossed as he walks.

“We can rebuild the city, Commander. The people—the survivors—”

“We can’t.” Woolsey doesn’t rise from her place, doesn’t even look up from whatever she’s writing.

Garevel swivels on his heel so quickly Mahariel’s surprised he doesn’t slip and break his ankle. “We _can._ And we _will._ ” He looks briefly at his boots, more like a little boy than a guard captain, and Mahariel’s heart fills with just as much regret as it has every single time she’s seen the consequences of her posting here. “It was us that did this; we should make it right.”

“We will.” Mahariel says this matter-of-factly, walking past her captain and taking a seat at the table. She says it as if she believes it, as if anything she says actually matters.

Woolsey corrects her. “We do not have the men, we do not have the materials, we do not have the funds. If the crown does not remove you from power, the people surely will. We have a very limited amount of time in which to work and we cannot waste that on futile attempts to make amends with a people who never fully accepted your authority to begin with.”

Silently, Nathaniel takes a seat beside Mahariel. He almost rests his arms on the table top but remembers himself. If this weren’t the worst meeting Mahariel’s had this week—and it absolutely will be—she’d laugh at him. _Manners._

Instead, she rests her own elbows on the table and looks at Woolsey. “What do you suggest?”

“How can you entertain her—”

“Because,” Woolsey says, cutting Garevels off before he can quite finish. “I am right.” She then redirects herself at Mahariel. The woman may be a bit harsh at times, but Mahariel has never grieved her practicality and honesty. “I suggest you round up all the resources at your disposal, liquidate them, make as sizable a donation to the citizenry as is reasonable, and secure the Vigil as a Warden outpost _only._ Have talks with Anora as will be necessary and, if possible, revert the arling into the hands of Varel; the people will want one of their own and it will still allow us to effectively retain control as the First Warden intended.”

Mahariel steeples her fingers and drops her forehead against them, the nails of her thumbs digging into the skin. “Won’t work.”

“It will be difficult to convince—”

“Varel’s a warden,” she says flatly. “Took the Joining in secret before the attack, wanted to help us defend the place as best he could.”

Mahariel can practically see Woolsey’s gaze sharpen. “I see. Well, the arling doesn’t need to know that, nor does the crown. This changes nothing.”

Mahariel shakes her head. “Stroud. Stroud’s here, with a bunch of recruits. They’ll all know. If the people can sneak agents into the Vigil—and they have, at least twice—then there’s no good reason to assume they won’t find out about this. We can’t hold on to the arling; I’ll be surprised if we can even hold onto the Keep.”

Finally, Nathaniel speaks. “What will they do then? Give it back to the Howes?” He _snorts._ “I haven’t met the queen, of course, but I can’t see her going back on the Vigil, not after everything. As for the arling, though, Mahariel’s probably right. Varel might’ve been an option before but not now. I imagine the crown will simply take it until it can be handed off to the next most impressive courtier. Maker knows how many banns and their people were dislocated during the Blight; handing the citizenry over to one of them would be a great move, politically speaking.”

Mahariel elbows him. “Knew the noble bastard in you was just waiting to get out,” she says.

Woolsey coughs and Mahariel reminds herself that now is not the time for smirks and jokes. “Sigrun,” she says, looking a few places down the table. “You’ve been awfully quiet this whole time.”

Sigrun stops picking at her fingernails and spreads her hands in her lap, but she doesn’t look up. “I didn’t even think about it, honestly. When you came back to the Vigil, I—what happened to the city didn’t even occur to me, I was just so relieved that you were back. But, Commander, they haven’t even gathered their dead. The guards won’t let anyone in or out, because of the blight. People are scaling the guard towers, trying to sneak through blasted out walls. It’s just... terrible. I don’t know how we help. I don’t know if we can.”

Mahariel takes a deep, pointless breath. “Mistress Woolsey, start taking stock of what we have and what we can spare. I want every coin, every grain of wheat, every person accounted for. We’ll work from there.”

It’s not a decision and they all know that. But it’s movement, it’s something to do while they find somewhere to really start. Woolsey rises from the table and nods her head, already heading back to her office.

“If you’ll pardon me, Commander,” says Garevel from behind her. “I’d like to return to the yard and deal with the men who marched with us.”

She waves him off, headache already throbbing behind her eyes. It’s only the early afternoon; there’s still plenty of time for this day to get worse and she still has plenty to do.


End file.
